


Gone to Seed

by cognomen



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Multi, post Hannibal novel canon, shortform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-01
Updated: 2015-03-01
Packaged: 2018-03-15 19:42:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3459521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Hannibal Lecter introduces the woman as his sister, Mischa Lecter, a lie Will Graham can taste as if he had spoken the words himself. She is too young, her features only a blandly beautiful version of the american mixture. She is practical, Will senses from the subdued makeup, the shoulder length hair that is arranged back from her face in a fashion to either please Hannibal or that he had arranged himself.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>Much as he had once arranged Will to fit some hole in his life. There is a shine in her doll eyes, an intelligence. </i>
</p>
<p>A post <i>Hannibal</i> novel-canon piece, mostly reactionary, since the book was so much about tying up loose ends from Hannibal's past, and one seemed left undone and ignored.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gone to Seed

Hannibal Lecter introduces the woman as his sister, Mischa Lecter, a lie Will Graham can taste as if he had spoken the words himself. She is too young, her features only a blandly beautiful version of the american mixture. She is practical, Will senses from the subdued makeup, the shoulder length hair that is arranged back from her face in a fashion to either please Hannibal or that he had arranged himself.

Much as he had once arranged Will to fit some hole in his life. There is a shine in her doll eyes, an intelligence. 

"This is Clarice Starling," Will Graham answers, watching to see if Hannibal's smile grows or shrinks. "Or it was, once."

The smile does not waver. Will is wholly uncertain why it is that Hannibal Lecter - this new, revised version - has come to visit Will in his hole in Louisiana. 

There is nothing new or revised about Will Graham, he has become just another loose end. The thoughts weave together in the drunken haze of his mind with the sudden ease and clarity that they had once enjoyed naturally. 

"Come to wrap up loose ends now that you've become wary of them, Dr. Lecter?" Will bites out, and begins the laborious process of getting to his feet. 

He does not touch his scars. He does not look at the woman Hannibal has fit into the absent space of - what? Sister? Lover? _Both_? Will doesn't solve puzzles anymore, he just wants to die on his feet.

"I hear you fed Verger his own eel," Will continues, digging the facts from his own rusty memory. At least, the facts as he'd found presented in the copies of the Tattler that Lecter paid someone to slip under Will's door to keep Will aware that he was alive.

"Did I?" Hannibal's voice climbs in amusement, and he trades a glance with his silent companion, the Ghost of Mischa Lecter.

Will doesn't think the surprise is disingenuous. He thinks back, wishing for whiskey to calm his aching head, for over-the-counter painkillers to quiet the itching and aching that speaking causes in his face.

The pendulum makes a rusty sound in his mind and sticks. Will Graham has fallen out of the space and time of the world. 

He is on his feet to die.

"Will, I never considered you a loose end," Hannibal says, in his sliding and cultured tone. He has spent more time in America and his accent has faded some. "More like a garden to be cultivated."

"You did a great job with the roto-tiller," a bitterness, a sharp tone that emulates what Molly sounded like when she was all sharp points and upsets.

Hannibal lifts his hand then and touches what is left of the soft tissue of Will's cheek, forging an electric connection between them that stills the shaking in Will's whiskey-deprived body. His touch is cool and dry, but it has never been clinical. 

Will is a garden gone to weeds - disintegrating dandelions and sharp-thorned nettles. Beneath, though - at least in the assessment Will reads in Hannibal's eyes - the ground is still good.

He scoffs and tips his head away. "Time can't reverse, Hannibal. You've made a space for something you lost. What does that mean for me? There's nothing for me to replace."

Hannibal Lecter only smiles, laying Will's question at his own feet as a hunting dog with a duck, perhaps. 

Will's mind engages. It turns over rusty, groaning to life protesting the use of too many parts stuck in place for so long. It’s an ache, and one that makes him want to reach for a bottle. He doesn’t remember the fate of the last one - finished or hidden away from himself - and supposes Hannibal wouldn’t let him drink from it anyway. It would seem cowardice, a rejection of the heavy burden of thought. The answer is damnably slow in coming, while Hannibal stands immaculate in the middle of the squallor of Will’s living room. 

He needn’t replace anything, Will Graham realizes, and drags his eyes up from the juxtaposition of Hannibal’s Italian leather shoes against his well beaten and stained carpet. _He needs only resume his own place._ It did not matter that Will had never seen the place there before, only that Hannibal had prepared it for him and prepared him for it. 

There are two options - time running forward and backward, a garden left to rest and then resewn when the gardener turned his hand back to it, or burned and left fallow. Will considers both, and supposes either option, fire or care, is better than this hellish limbo. 

-


End file.
